Why So High?

It was hot and quiet in Mesa, Arizona, as a
crowd gathered outside the headquarters of the police department on
Aug. 25, 2007. On this day in 2003, the parents of 15-year-old Mario
Madrigal Jr. called the police in a panic because their oldest son was
threatening to kill himself with a kitchen knife. Within hours, they
found themselves watching helplessly as Mario Jr. was shot and killed
by police officers, who say he had threatened them with the knife. Four
years later, about 100 people, most of them wearing black T-shirts,
joined the family in insisting that Mario was a threat to no one but
himself that night and that he was killed by a police force
ill-equipped to engage with mental-health crises and Mesa’s growing
Latino community. “We need changes in how officers approach us
Hispanics,” Mario Madrigal Sr. said. “They should be much more educated
[in] knowing our culture…and understand that we are human beings.”

No one from the Mesa Police Department emerged to face the crowd.
The crowd was literally speaking to a brick wall as they chanted
“justice for Mario” and cheered Mario Sr.’s insistent statement, “The
case is not closed.” Although the Mesa PD’s internal investigation
cleared the officers who shot Mario Jr. of any wrongdoing, the family
is involved in an independent investigation, and a federal district
court judge has set a date in September 2008 for the Madrigals’ civil
case to be brought before a jury. The family hopes they will be more
responsive than local authorities have been.

The Madrigals are hardly the only family in the greater Phoenix
metropolitan area that feels like they’re talking to a brick wall as
they seek justice in the police killing of a loved one.

In March 2006, Malissia Clinton’s younger brother, James Deon
Lennox, 35, was shot by a police officer outside his apartment in Mesa.
According to the story Clinton and her mother have pieced together from
witnesses’ accounts, Lennox and his girlfriend had returned home late
after a night out and began arguing about where to park the car. Within
minutes, a police officer arrived. Then two more officers appeared. For
reasons none of the witnesses can be sure of, Lennox and one of the
officers got into a physical fight. Then, Officer David Kohler shot
Lennox twice–once in the shoulder, once in the chest–and James Deon
Lennox died.

Mesa police spokesmen say Kohler felt his life was threatened–that
Lennox had already hit him with a lawn chair and that he fired his gun
when Lennox picked up another one. Neighbors say the chairs in question
were cheap, flimsy ones–not life-threatening–and the autopsy report by
the county medical examiner says that both shots came from a distance.
The city of Mesa denied a claim of wrongdoing filed by Lennox’s family,
and the county attorney’s office has not filed criminal charges against
Kohler. An internal police investigation into the shooting is still
under way.

According to Lennox’s family, two witnesses have said that one of
the officers called him a “nigger” the night he was killed. Malissia
Clinton, an attorney in California, thinks her brother was “just tired
of playing by rules that are unfair.” He’d been arguing with his
girlfriend, he’d had a little bit to drink, it was late and suddenly
there were police officers on the scene.

“As a Black man,” Clinton said, “you know what you are supposed to
do and what you’re not supposed to do with the police. There are rules
that are kinda unspoken, but everybody understands that you could lose
your life, so you need to really be careful. That’s a given–my husband
knows it, Barack Obama knows it…everybody knows that.” So what happened
that night? “I just think that he was tired, he decided that this guy
was not gonna put his hands on him–if he wanted to talk to him like a
man, that was fine, but if he wanted to play physical at all, he was
just not gonna stand for it. And so, he decided to take a stand, and I
think that that’s why he lost his life.”

Lennox and Madrigal were just two of the many civilians who have
been shot to death by police from various departments throughout the
multi-city Phoenix metropolitan area–in the city of Phoenix alone, an
average of more than one per month since 2000, making it among the
worst cities in the nation for police shootings.

Phoenix had the highest rate of fatal police shootings from 2000 to
2005 among the 10 U.S. cities with more than one million people,
according to federal data. In fact, Phoenix ranked second in total
number of fatal police shootings, just behind New York City and ahead
of much larger cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles. During those
years, more Latinos were killed by police in Phoenix than in any other
large city that tracked victims’ ethnic identities. (In federal
reporting, Hispanic/Latino is considered an ethnic rather than a racial
category.) Neighboring police departments in the greater Phoenix
metropolitan area–notably Mesa, Scottsdale and Chandler–have also
attracted attention for a series of fatal shootings of civilians. In
Mesa (which has a population of approximately 460,000), 45 civilians
were shot by police between January 2000 and August 2007, according to
the Mesa Police Department. (The department was unable to indicate how
many of those shootings were fatal.)

Maricopa County’s largest urban area is one of the most dangerous
places in the nation to be a Latino person interacting with law
enforcement. Among the 27 cities with more than 250,000 people that
tracked victims’ ethnicities during this time, 23 out of 137, or one in
six, Hispanic victims of police shootings were killed in Phoenix,
although Phoenix had just 6 percent of the total population. As the
region’s Latino population grows, local police departments remain
majority white, and community organizers feel shut out of civilian
review processes ostensibly created to include them. Further, despite
programs touted for reducing the shooting rate or improving
police-community relations–the introduction of Tasers to many local
departments’ arsenals, Spanish-language initiatives, and increased
training in dealing with people who live with mental illness–shootings
of civilians by police persist throughout the Phoenix metropolitan
area. And, across cities and departments, police officers rarely suffer
any consequences for choosing to fire.

Phoenix is one of the fastest-growing, and fastest-changing,
metropolitan areas in the United States. The urban center of Maricopa
County (which has experienced the largest numerical increase in
population of any U.S. county since the 2000 Census) encompasses the
city of Phoenix as well as numerous adjacent cities such as Mesa,
Scottsdale and Chandler. Since the 1990s, the Hispanic/Latino
population in particular has grown rapidly, with Phoenix proper going
from 20 percent Latino in 1990, to 34 percent in 2000, to 41.8 percent
in 2005.

Yet police department demographics have been much slower to change.
A Department of Justice report on police personnel showed a Phoenix
Police Department that was 81 percent white in June 2003. (12.7 percent
of officers identified as ethnically Hispanic.) Four years later,
despite the department’s stated efforts to diversify, the Phoenix PD is
77.9 percent white, with only 14.8 percent of officers identifying as
ethnically Hispanic. In fast-growing Mesa, where, according to the
city, the “ethnic/minority” population grew by 20 percent between 1990
and 2000 and Hispanics today represent 25 percent of the total
population, only 14.2 percent of police officers in the field identify
as Hispanic. “Whenever you have bilingual, bicultural police, usually
you have better police-community relations,” said Salvador Reza, an
organizer with the indigenous community-development organization
Tonatierra who works with immigrant day laborers in Phoenix. “When you
don’t have that, then there’s the language barrier, then on top of
that, there’s a cultural barrier. [Among Latinos in Phoenix] the police
are not seen as to protect and to serve, they’re seen as to harass and
make sure that you get to jail so you can get deported.”

Indeed, said Reza and other local activists, any consideration of
Phoenix Latinos’ relationship to the police must be looked at in the
context of the broader climate of anti-immigrant/anti-Latino xenophobia
in the area. In July 2007, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (aka
“America’s Toughest Sheriff”) created a hotline for people to call in
information about undocumented immigrants.

The Phoenix Police Department does have several community advisory
boards meant to connect police to specific local communities. But Reza
noted that the members of these boards are “more like yes men, instead
of asking the hard questions. They do have a review board, but they
don’t have any power.”

That may partially explain why, in a Department of Justice report
about citizen complaints of police use of force in 2002, only 17 were
recorded for Phoenix. Cities with similar populations and
police-department sizes had about eight times as many–133 in San
Antonio and 132 in San Diego. It may also explain why Phoenix attorney
Augustine Jimenez gets calls about police brutality “about twice a
week”–”but there are very few cases we can take on,” he said. “[I get]
calls all the time from poor Mexican people who get beaten up by
police, but the sad reality is, unless you have some videotape or
witnesses who are white…The cases we’ve taken and been successful on,
we’ve had strong physical evidence to support our claim.”

In spring 2001, Gerardo Ramirez-Diaz got into a fight with Phoenix
police after his roommate called the cops because he’d attacked him.
The roommate, aware that Ramirez-Diaz was living with schizoaffective
disorder, wanted the police to help get Ramirez-Diaz into treatment.
But when police arrived, Ramirez-Diaz wouldn’t comply with their
orders–he threw things at them and repeatedly shouted “stay away from
me.” In the ensuing struggle, a Phoenix police officer shot and wounded
Ramirez-Diaz, whose family was eventually paid $699,000 in damages by
the city. Despite a jury’s decision to award damages for excessive
force, the police department’s internal review found the use of force
“in policy.”

Ramirez-Diaz’s attorney, Augustine Jimenez, sees his client’s case
as one example of a larger problem: “Officers deal almost on a daily
basis with individuals who suffer with mental illnesses. Officers
demand that you comply with their orders, but these people who are
mentally ill don’t always understand the officers or are in some kind
of psychotic event or episode.” Another local attorney, Richard Treon,
anecdotally connects this dynamic to the “excessive number of shootings
going on in the Phoenix area” in recent years, saying, “It seems like
it most frequently happens when police are on a 911 call to deal with
someone who is mentally ill.”

Although every police officer in Arizona receives training on
dealing with people who are mentally ill, and Phoenix has a unique
40-hour training block on mental illness, the stories of Ramirez-Diaz
and Mario Madrigal Jr. suggest this may not be enough. “It’s a tough
situation for the cops because they’re not trained to be social
workers; they’re trained to be almost automatons who react almost like
a military force,” Treon said.

Martha Madrigal, the mother of Mario Jr., urges people not to
call the police when loved ones are in crisis. In the wake of her son’s
death, she created a postcard that reads, “If your son, daughter, or
loved one is suicidal, [or] under the influence of drugs or alcohol, do
not call police for help.” On the back, she has listed national
hotlines that address suicide, drugs and alcohol, domestic violence and
depression.

The Phoenix PD’s Sgt. Joel Tranter rejects the notion that officers
are trained as “automatons,” emphasizing that each officer goes through
simulation training to practice responding to a range of different
situations. “As far as being one canned response, that’s not true, each
response from officers is tailored to that situation.”

Yet communication breakdowns between police and civilians are not uncommon.

They happen across differences of mental states–as well as across language barriers.

Although the state’s basic training includes some modules on
interacting with people who do not speak English, there is no
Spanish-language requirement in officers’ basic training, despite the
fact that 28.5 percent of the state’s reported population is ethnically
Hispanic.

In summer 2007, all first responders on the Phoenix PD received 10
hours of Spanish lessons. But, Lt. Dave Kelly noted, while most of the
participants appreciated it, there was “very vocal” protest from “about
25 percent” of them who did not. And so, from now on, Spanish-language
education will be available only as an option to Phoenix police
officers.

The impact of lack of mandated Spanish-language education on
police-shooting incidents is difficult to measure. But it’s clear that
any communication gap may be part of a deadly equation when a commonly
cited reason for use of force is an individual’s failure to comply with
an officer’s orders.

Most officer-involved-shooting cases in the Phoenix area are handled
entirely within police departments’ internal review processes, and the
outcome of those internal investigations is murky. In Phoenix, the
police department’s Use of Force Review Board, which includes officers’
commanders and peers as well as two citizens (selected by police and
the city manager’s office), reviews every incident in which an officer
intentionally shoots a gun–regardless of whether anyone is hurt. From
2000 to 2005, that board reviewed 110 shooting incidents and found 11
of them to be “out of policy.” Those findings were relayed to the
police chief as “recommendations,” and the chair of the Use of Force
Review Board isn’t sure what ultimately happened to the 11 “out of
policy” cases. Assistant Chief Kevin Robinson, who chairs the
Disciplinary Review Board, is similarly unsure about what happened to
those cases. All he could say in a July 2007 interview was, “I’m not
aware of any that resulted in termination.”

Although there were more than 100 incidents of officer-involved
shootings in the city of Phoenix alone in the last five years, and
numerous shootings in neighboring jurisdictions, only one shooting in
the county (involving the Chandler Police Department) has
resulted in criminal charges being filed against the officer who
fired–and that was for the fatal shooting of a white woman. Even in
that case, the state standards and training board decided against
revoking the officer’s status after a jury found him not guilty. (The
city of Chandler did decide not to reinstate him as a police officer.)
Of the many cases that did not go to criminal trial, the city of
Phoenix paid on civil settlements related to only three fatal
officer-involved-shooting cases from 2000 to 2005. The consequences to
police officers involved in the other 65 fatal shootings of civilians
in Phoenix in that period are unknown. In Mesa, only three city payouts
for police shootings by gun were made between January 2000 and August
2007, although police shot 45 civilians during that time. (The Mesa
city attorney’s office has not responded to queries about whether any
of the payouts were for fatal shootings.)

James Deon Lennox’s family is still waiting to see whether the city
of Mesa will pay damages to help support his four children. The city of
Mesa denied their initial claim of wrongdoing, and the Maricopa county
attorney’s office has no plans to take action on the case. The family’s
lawsuit against the city is in the discovery stage. The family of Mario
Madrigal Jr., dismayed by the Mesa Police Department’s finding that the
officers who shot their son committed no wrongdoing, are waiting to see
whether a federal jury might take a different view of the case.

Will fatal shootings by police continue to occur in and around
Phoenix, averaging more than one a month as they have for years, with
no clear cause or consequence? “You just get the sense that it’s more
permissive in that area,” said Malissia Clinton. “You can’t look to,
necessarily, the judicial system. You can’t look to the prosecutors…I’m
not sure you can look to the citizens. And so if no one’s gonna do a
sanity check, then that means the police are running around unchecked.”

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